Krakatoa Forever My Friend

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It’s Nature’s Way (of telling you, somethings wrong)

Look I have nothing wrong with fixing the Earth as far as we are able, but let’s make sure that other huge polluters, do their part. And that’s not to say that we wait to do ours, but let us cll out those who could care less.

They are where we were and where we never want to go again. And we do have a lot of work to do in our own back yard. Disregard for our planet is a callous end game with no winners. I remember an episode of ‘Twilight Zone’. The people saw temperatures rising exponentially and when the man character awakens from his dream (delirium caused by a high fever) the opposite is happening, the world slipping into an Ice Age.

The episode was ‘The Midnight Sun’ and we have people being alarmed at either prospect and like an attack from Aliens we cannot find the aliens we were scared of. Like Orson Welles and attack of the Martians and the suggestion by some that they are here and we cannot see them. It is all about action/reaction or the chicken and the egg or in this sense. a Microwave or a frozen Pot Pie.

There always seems to be some nefarious Monster of our own imagination seeking to neutralize what we may have. Enter ‘the politican’! With their gavel and 90 minute lunches, they tell people what color their house can be or the the easement on a person’s property.

But still this is all just a backdrop to the finality of being stuck in Amber. With many there is little chance of seeing the Grand Canyon. Gourmet fare is a trip to the Double Arches where Happy Meals and disposable income, fight that never ending battle and where obesity inevitably rounds out a person’s waistline.

But we have a global crisis potentially waiting in the wings. This plague is a two-sided sword where isolation and death is like a weather warning for tornadoes. The solemn processions spares no one and promises of behaving to God resoundingly beg for redemption. For the survivors, a pin prick of consciousness becomes a lulling nightmare and the cracks and refuse along the street remain the same.

Even the rats poke their heads out and see if the coast is clear wishing the cats and other exterminators are elsewhere busy.

CONAKRY/MONROVIA (Reuters) – Bushmeat – from bats to antelopes, squirrels, porcupines and monkeys – has long held pride of place on family menus in West and Central Africa, whether stewed, smoked or roasted.

A visit to a traditional market in the region assails the senses with a huge variety of forest game – mammal, bird and reptile carcasses smoked and partitioned and the smell of singed animal hair filling the air.

But an outbreak of the deadly Ebola fever in Guinea has rekindled concerns about the health risks of age-old African hunting and eating traditions that bring humans into close contact with wild forest animals.

The World Health Organisation says about 86 suspected cases of Ebola have been reported, with 62 deaths so far. Guinean authorities put the death toll at 63. [ID:nL5N0MN50D]

Experts who have studied the Ebola virus from its discovery in 1976 in Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire, say its suspected origin – what they call the reservoir host – is forest bats. Links have also been made to the carcasses of fr

freshly slaughtered animals consumed as bushmeat.

Bats – often served in a spicy stew called “kedjenou” – have long been a favourite in Guinea’s southeastern Forest Zone, the epicentre of the current outbreak. But sales of these and other bushmeat delicacies have now been banned by Guinean authorities fighting the Ebola outbreak.

“We visited the markets in the region and there was no more bat meat on sale,” Colonel Remy Lamah, Minister of Health, said from the area hit by the outbreak, which borders Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Liberia and Sierra Leone, which have reported suspected Ebola deaths, announced similar bans on the sale of bushmeat, spreading alarm and dismay among consumers and the many who make a living from the trade.

“PEOPLE WON’T BUY OUR MEAT”

“Our people here eat monkey and bat … we have warned them about eating bushmeat,” said Tolbert G. Nyenswah, a health official in Liberia. “We have warned them about coming into contact with fresh meat. We have also warned them about eating dead animals when they don’t know what killed them.”

But specialists believe bushmeat bans will be ineffective, not just because of the scale of the traditional trade providing a valuable protein source to millions, but also because the link with Ebola is seen limited to very specific circumstances.

“You will not stop it … I just think it’s futile,” said Bob Swanepoel, a virologist at the University of Pretoria’s Zoonoses Research Unit, who has studied most of Africa’s major outbreaks of Ebola and other similar haemorrhagic fevers like Marburg, Lassa and Crimean-Congo fever.

Swanepoel stressed that according to scientific evidence, the main risk of human infection by Ebola or Marburg is not thought to be from all bushmeat, only from infected animals and only from fresh carcasses.

“If you handle wet meat, there’s a much bigger chance,” he said, saying a 1996 outbreak in Gabon was believed to have been caused by local people eating the still fresh body of a dead chimpanzee they had come across in the forest.

Large primates, like chimpanzees and gorillas, also die from Ebola, Swanepoel said. They are also often killed by bushmeat hunters despite campaigns by international conservation groups battling to ensure their survival.

Swanepoel said cooking and smoking the meat was likely to reduced the chances of infection, but there was still a risk.

Besides local consumption, tonnes of African bushmeat finds its way each year to ethnic restaurants in Paris, Brussels and New York, where members of the African diaspora prize the dishes as a nostalgic treat from home.

In 2009, a Liberian woman caught smuggling baboon, green monkey and warthog meat into New York’s John F. Kennedy airport was sentenced to three years of probation. Prosecutors cited the risk of disease and the need for wildlife conservation.

BEWARE THE BATS

Despite the fears over bushmeat, Swanepoel says study of Ebola and Marburg outbreaks since 1976 indicate it is close contact with bats in particular that seems to be behind the transmission to humans of the deadly virus that causes vomiting, diarrhoea and both internal and external bleeding.

“Ebola is likely harboured by bats living in the forest,” Swanepoel said, citing suspected Ebola and Marburg infections in Congo, Uganda and Sudan traced to the presence of bats in caves, mines and factories frequented by humans.

This could also explain the dispersion of the outbreaks – Guinea, in the heart of West Africa, is thousands of kilometres away from the site of past outbreaks in Central and East Africa. Swathes of forest cover large parts of West Africa.

“These bats migrate vast distances,” Swanepoel said, adding they could also infect other animals eaten by humans, such as antelopes. Bats are also hunted and consumed by some large animals such as baboons.

Swanepoel said three or four bat species were “under suspicion” for transmitting Ebola and scientists were still trying to pin down the specific reservoir host.

On his desk in Pretoria he keeps a model made of black beads of the Hammerhead Bat, Latin name Hypsignathus Monstrosus, to remind him of a likely carrier of one of the world’s most lethal and feared diseases. “It’s monstrously ugly,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Alain Amontchi in Abidjan and Pascal Fletcher in Johannesburg; Writing by Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Courtesy of Reuters…………

Oh and this is NOT the effects of Global Warming but what in the Philippines are dealing with and this kind of futility seems never-ending! Trouble will find us in this world and I do not have to tell you that.

Authorities say the Philippines is again bracing for wild weather, only days after the country was hit by Typhoon Rammasun.

Are the Philippines a haven for terrorism?

The U.S. State Department has considered the southern Philippines a “terrorist safe haven” since the classification was created in 2006. According to the State Department’s 2008report, the Philippine government has little control in the Sulu archipelago and the island of Mindanao. The government has also had trouble combating resentment among the local Muslim minority regarding policies of the central government. As a result, the Philippines is home to a number of militant groups, including the Abu Sayyaf Group, the Communist Party of the Philippines/New Peoples Army, Jemaah Islamiyah, the Alex Boncayao Brigade, the Pentagon Gang, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). These groups have conducted over one-hundred attacks within the Philippines since 2004, the largest of which was a ferry bombing that killed 130 people. The Philippine government has taken significant steps to combat terrorism, but terrorists continue to use the country as a base to organize, raise funds, train, and operate.

But lastly we need to see why the Philippines has something to offer with spectacular venues and breathtaking vistas. Filipino will go on as that really is the way to handle adversity. Make a friend today with someone else in the world.

All thumbs up for such an awesome post! And a lovely song too. But as a Filipino (although now in Hawaii), and a Filipino journalist, I’m not contesting anything you’ve written. Rather, you’ve truly earned my profound admiration and highest regard, kudos! Maraming salamat, at mabuhay ka!

Sorry to miss your reply to me and thank you for the kind words and ciompliments. As far as those seizures I see a neurologist this coming Monday. Again, thanks for the kind words and replies. Seizure cause is unknown.

Larry, rest your mind. You have to be kind to yourself too. How can you continue the beautiful works you have started here, if you let so many things stress you out? The world has 101 reasons to grieve about, but most of what we’re dealing with are fruits of our own doings.